Yazu-Ko FIGHTO!!!

Background: Before I even get into this one, I must explain both baseball in Japan, and Koshien. First off, to say that baseball in Japan is big would be one the grossest understatements of all time. So much that it makes me laugh. So much that reading the sentence I just wrote caused a giggle. Baseball is to Japan as hockey is to Canada as football is to America as football (the original; get it right) is to Europe as... Well, you get the idea. Games sell out days and weeks in advance, and TVs across the country light up when a match is played.

Now, you might think that since high school teams are naturally of a lower plateau than professional ball that they wouldn't be as popular. Wrong. If anything, they're even more so. It continues the prevalent theme here of being cool by association. Just as the high school/university you go to, city that you live in, and job that you hold have important ramifications for self both externally and internally, the high school baseball team is just one more extension. It's a way to rally the community together as well as provide for identity for the person: "MY school is the best in the prefecture. Nwah!"

Second part of the prelude is Koshien. Hanshin Koshien Stadium is the 73 year-old badboy that's holds the annual high school baseball tournament. It is also home to the Hanshin Tigers professional baseball club, but the high school tournaments carry such weight that the Tigers' schedule will be rearranged to have away games during said times to make room. That should give you some indication as to how insane these tournaments are. A tournament is held in spring and summer, with the spring one being invitational (Usually one team from each prefecture or region; about 36 teams) and the summer one involving a team from each prefecture (two from Tokyo and Hokkaido each; 49 teams). Conquering your inner demons, slaying the Emperor and bringing balance to The Force... I mean, beating the other teams in your prefecture is enough to get you a trip to Koshien. Just being able to go is an honor in itself. Even if you're out the first round, when you get home, you can still rub your nose in anyone within about 50 km's face that you're better than all of them. And if you win... Well, you're basically God for the rest of your life. You can tell everyone, "Yeah, me and my team won @ Koshien in xxxx," and olive branches will drop to your feet.

Wouldn't you know it. The year I start in Japan is the year we make it to Koshien. Huzzah! Now, @ the first, I was just kinda "meh" about the whole thing since I'm not a huge baseball fan to begin with, however enough hoopla around here about just what it means to everyone @ school and the community gave me a bit of genki-ness on the matter. Not to mention that I've watched the baseball team train every day (even weekends) really hard for each and every game, so I thought it a great chance to see them in action. Finally, my desire to see a Japanese baseball game in action and all the associated insanity would be satiated by this chance, so that sealed it.

A Tuesday ungodly wakeup of 4 AM and being @ school for 5:15 AM and on a bus by 5:45 AM later, we found ourselves arriving just outside of Koge around 10:30 or so. You know that this was the place as there were high school kids aplenty about. And what rocked was the number of local residents of our town that made the 3 hour mission to come and cheer the team on (See above - RE: Community Rally). We all 500 or so of us swarm the stadium to find it relatively full of people, something I was a little surprised by considering it was the middle of a Tuesday morning.

Both teams have their schools come out to egg them on, but don't think that it's just sitting in the stands and cheering. Oh, little Japan, just have to one-up us in any and everything. We bring with us Oendan. Oendan is like a cheerleading section, except that everyone is a cheerleader. Like, y'know? There are several people @ the front who lead all of us in a cheer, and the crowd responds and yells and makes noise and whatever. There are actual cheerleaders all up and down the aisle to complement us, and the school band provides the music. And we do nothing but cheer. When our team is up to bat, we include the name of the batter in the cheer, and cheer until our side is retired, then we can chill, but when we make an out while playing the field, we do a special out cheer that includes the name of whoever made the out. All and all, you're actually exhausted by the end of watching a baseball game here.
After the warm up, the game starts with little fanfare - no anthems, no first pitch, just a bow and go time. Cheers erupts, outs are made, bats crack. Actually, our defense was awesome. A foul caught going into a dugout, a diving catch from behind the back, double play... (I'm not making these up; they actually happened). When all was said and done, we walked out of there with a 1-0 victory. The crowd goes wild as the home team runs over for a bow. So much more madly exciting than Canada. And let me tell you how when we went back onto that bus to go home, all 40 of us dropped out faster than post-Thanksgiving dinner.
This is how work days should always be spent.

Hate Love, Love Sweets, Sweet Sweets

To continue my theme of trying to make up for lost blog time, I'm going to write one that I should have written on February 15th.

So Valentine's Day in Japan. Now, ordinarily my feelings towards contemporary Valentine's Day itself range from indifference to stupefied contempt. For years, I was preaching that this was a holiday who's purpose was to screw men over by an overstimulation of the economy and our women's joy meters - The whole day a superfluous attempt to convince us that there need be one specific day on which to show someone that we care lest we be put into the doghouse. Here, things are different.

On Valentine's Day in Japan, the tables are turned: It is in fact women who buy things for men. Usually it is something small, most often being chocolate. Also, it doesn't have to be confined to that special someone; women will sometimes give something small to a boss, coworker, or friend, just for the hell of it. Well, it's to foster improved relations vis-a-vis other people, I suppose. She's not compelled to give something to everyone male in the office, however; usually just a close friend or two will do.

Whatever the reason, I mind not. For on my day, I cashed in bigtime. It's not to say that my desk looked like a Laura Secord, but I did get a few little chocolates here and there from teachers, students, and even one mystery (Scandal @ school - who are you, mystery-chocolate-giver?!). Now, this gives rise to a puzzling internal dilemma. On the one hand, the slightly obligatory but nonetheless personally volitional nature of the chocolate causes me to side with my standing mindset on the issue, namely that it's a commercialized trap. However, the joy-joy feelings imbued from getting said chocolate tends to push those feelings aside. So brand me a hypocrite if you will, but I was quite happy with - for the first time - having the tables turned and being the one to reap benefits from yet another manifestation of the decline of Western Civilization (I wonder if this is how women feel on Valentine's day...).

One thing to note: This isn't the end of it. Oh no. In fact, in March, there's a day called White Day in which men are expected to repay those who gave them gifts on Valentine's. Three-fold, in fact. And THIS day was completely created out of the blue, purely for the expressed purpose of generating revenue. Nevertheless, most ladies who were generous a month prior find themselves in a Valentine's Day stupor when they're surprised with even better chocolate than what they gave.

So for men here, I guess there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Kanpai!

Laments and apologies to all. I know that I have taken quite the hiatus amidst promises of updating regularly, and have received a number of complaints re the quality and quantity of the blog. Therefore, I'm coming back to it full steam with a few new posts delivered at rapid-fire pace. The next few will go in descending chronological order however, so raise too many eyebrows at seeing a post for Valentine's day in the middle of March. I'll start with a topic that's fresh in me mind as I experienced it just 12 hours ago.

Japanese cultural lesson for today: Enkai - 宴会

This roughly translates as a banquet, but it boils down to being a work party. You know how sometimes you and a few friends get together after for a drink or two to unwind? Well, an enkai is basically the same thing except that you more or less have to go. And the few friends is all the teachers in the faculty/grade/school. And a drink or two is several or more. That's enkai in a very small nutshell.

There are more serious and formal enkai that follow the important events at school, such as start/end of the school year ceremonies, graduation, end of the term, end of the year, and so on. Rule of thumb is that if there's a ceremony of sorts at school, or a long vacation is about to start, then there's going to be an enkai that night. These usually include the entire school, including the principal, vice-principals, all teachers, office and grounds staff, and sometimes even PTA representatives or members of the school board. Beyond that, there are any number of smaller enkai that can be held for any number of reasons by any number of people. If the third year teachers prep for a month for a demonstration class for the school board and it's now over, enkai. If the science teachers finish a very large and important unit that required them to work more than usual, enkai. All the first year teachers want to get together right after the new year to have a mini pep rally, enkai. So on and so forth. These can range in size, but anything smaller than maybe five or six might just be considered dinner. Also, attendance isn't mandatory at any of them. However most everyone goes. They're more often than not quite fun, and it's a good way to foster good relationships with your fellow teachers.

Enkai begins with sitting in your assigned seat, or drawing a table or seat number from a hat. The principal or next highest up will make a short speech to commemorate whatever it is we may be celebrating and then a toast follows, "Kanpai!" We are then fed... everything. Plate after plate after plate of the most interesting foods you'll ever see. Mostly fish. It looks like each plate was storyboarded by Da Vinci, cooked by Wolfgang Puck, and sculpted on the plate by Michelangelo. In this manner, maybe five or six (or more) plates will meet you over the course of the evening, though only perhaps three or four will be fully devoured (I'll explain why in a minute).

And after that first cheers, that's when the drinking starts... These enkai are nearly always all you can drink, in that we don't have to order - the bottles are just brought out as fast as we can drink them. Therefore there's no need to baby a drink for a long time, or worry about the next round costing an arm and a leg. I've got to explain something about Japanese drinking. The glass is never half empty or half full here because it's always full. Customs here is that when you're out not by yourself, you pour the other person's drink. So if I notice that my friend beside me's cup is getting empty, I have to jump and top it off lest I be seen as rude. If someone fills their own drink the whole table we all @ the table realize it and collectively sigh in realizing that we've failed another of life's little tests. So after every bite it seems, you take a notice of everyone's class, and if even a sip is missing (a pseudo-exaggeration), or even if it's someone across the table, you get up, walk around there and pour in the 5 millilitres that are missing.

Eating and drinking continue for a while until people decide to take a bottle in hand and go visit other teachers to shoot the breeze. During said shooting, everyone seems to stop eating amidst the delicacies surreptitiously placed in front of us as the night goes on. Topping and polishing off bottles at Olympic marathon speeds, things quickly move from being a quiet dinner to raucously loud and open conversations about nearly everything under the sun. This gets louder and bawdier until about two hours have passed when, on the stroke of the minute, everyone promptly gets up and departs. But oh no, the fun doesn't end here. More often than not, a second (or several distinct second) brew ha ha will informally convene with a smaller group of friends at a nearby establishment to basically keep the party going. Third parties are rare, but do happen amongst the saucier teachers.

That is the short and skinny of what an enkai is. It ends not here, though, for what blog update would be complete without demonstrating how this vainly relates to me own life. Especially since I attended an enkai last night and thus can offer first-hand application details.

After the bottles really start to be popped with alacrity, we move to the stage that I like to call "Partytime" but like to think of in my head as "Let's Practice English Time". It's around here that I discovered that - lo and behold - quite a number of my teachers can not only understand but can quite skillfully speak English. Someone will sit down beside me with a bottle in hand to top me off, and then bust out a, "So? You enjoy beer? So do I. What kind of things do you drink in Canada?". As my eyes retreat back into my head, my response will then foster a rather coherent and lengthy conversation about everything under the sun, invariably looking and Canada and/or Japan in some way. The interesting thing about "Partytime" is that teachers whom I never speak to, or who will rarely even acknowledge that I come to their school will all of a sudden find the (liquid) courage to not only approach me for a conversation, but will also do so in English. Going beyond that now, their English is frequently much more better than my feeble Japanese. In theory, I could pass a whole day @ school with hearing 50/50 Japanese/English if everyone all of a sudden developed a "We Love English" attitude.

The only downtime to "Partytime" is that being the ALT seems to act as a bullseye for teachers with bottle in hand. You're targeted and prompty approached for a topoff, which you CAN refuse in theory, but seldom do in practice as to be polite. And a topoff itself isn't so much a detriment to one's state of being, but several rapid topoffs, by several people, over several minutes, over the course of the party will rapidly accumulate to several pints being consumed with realtive easy. And this is before even mentionning sake or several other Japanese alcohols (If you're discovered to be able to drink Japanese alcohol, you may as well just take an instant-hangover pill and go home right then and there).

"Partytime" also rocks because it affords a glimpse into a seldom-viewed world. You'll often see some certain coworkers @ their desks Mon-Fri 9-5 (More like 8-7) doing nothing but work, often not saying more than a few words, and being in all ways unassuming. And by the end of an enkai, those same busybees are talking ears off and becoming the life of the party. And odder still is seeing them back to their quiet, hardworking ways the very next morning as though nothing happened. It's refreshing to know that there is life beyond the office. Which brings me to the next point: The next day at work, we all act as though nothing happened. No matter how crazy or awesome or scary things get, no matter what is said or done, who's insulted or startled or amazed, it's out of sight and mind by 8 AM. Truly, what happens at enkai stays at enkai.

So that's a work party in a nutshell. We hope that you've enjoyed this cultural lesson. We do hope that you'll give this a try yourself as on any given night in Japan, somewhere, someone is having an enkai. Well, there are probably any number of thousands each night across the country, so find one today and crush a cup of sake!